


mountains were moved by the distances between us

by perennials



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen, Unacknowledged Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-07 17:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19856320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: A story about a boy and a boy and a basketball.





	mountains were moved by the distances between us

_in dreams we are always children_

i.

He works the evening shift at a small coffee shop several hundred meters off the main street in Yurakucho, not because he’s hoping Kagami will walk in one day with a burgundy coat slung over his shoulder, looking exactly as he did in high school, but because the owner is some caustic thirty-something year old from a well-off family who pays him generously despite his disregard for society at large. The shop itself is slightly cramped and far from breathtaking. Its interior is eclectic, from the wooden stools with three or four legs and the metal tables with peeling yellow paint to the flowerpot for the tiny radio that plays soft indie music in the morning and alternative rock after noon. If you tried to run your finger across the surface of your dining space it would likely get caught on a spot of dried syrup. It always smells faintly like mint.

Still, its clumsy, put-together demeanor has drawn a dedicated following. Weekday evenings are never that crowded. Most of the time, Tetsuya leans against the old bookshelf at the back of the shop and reads a book.

ii.

In his third year of college, he fell ill with a serious life-threatening disease. It was called ‘suddenly I’m not sure what I really want out of my life and everything has become meaningless’, and had come, in a dream, to generations of students before him, hitting Tetsuya extra hard particularly because he was one of those classical literature majors who read paperbacks on the train and smoked cigarettes when they were anxious. He was frequently anxious. This led to mishaps like oversleeping when he should have been half an hour early to class, and forgetting to use punctuation when he spoke. Kise had called him out for the latter issue a thousand times over. At least Tetsuya was a good listener.

After mulling it over for several weeks, he decided to do something rather out of character for his conservative self, and consult someone. Akashi observed that he looked more tired than he had during finals season the year prior, and then straightened his expensive-looking collar and ran a hand through his expensive-looking hair. Tetsuya knew on some instinctual level that Akashi was right, but he was stubborn and idealistic and wanted to prove to the world that he could make things work for himself. He held on.

In his fourth year, he stayed up for so many nights consecutively that he grew delirious and almost toppled off the balcony of his room, and was subsequently force-fed by Akashi to his family's private doctor. The man, who Tetsuya distantly thought resembled an older, more emotionally resolved Midorima, declared that he needed more sleep and more breathing space. Three days later, he dropped out of college.

“You look like you’ve been sleeping well. Not that I’m saying you are, or that you should be, but.” Aomine thumbed the stubble on his chin, wrinkling his brows. “Good for you, Tetsu.” At twenty-two, he had finally stopped using basketball as a proxy for his feelings and had mellowed out considerably, especially since Kise had yelled at him and then kissed him in quick succession at that western-fusion restaurant earlier on in June. Tetsuya had liked the salmon risotto there. It was well-seasoned.

“I see adulthood has done you many favors.”

“Blunt as always, Tetsu.”

Some time in winter he wound up at the small Yurakucho coffee shop and managed to trick the manager into thinking he was an intellectual by talking about love and leaving and martyrdom. And then the rest was history.

iii.

He’s not very good at pouring coffee. When he first started working here, the caustic thirty-something year old owner had been surprisingly patient, teaching him this and that and then slightly more, in case he wanted to impress some girl he liked, so Tetsuya picked up ‘this and that’. These days, he can handle the basics well enough to pull a decent latte. It does not bother him that the patrons are never blown away by his service or the coffee he serves. Most of them are here for the flowerpot they keep the radio in, which is metallic, cornflower blue and hangs from the ceiling near the entrance. They appreciate the loudness of the coffee shop’s interior. It has a way of speaking to their sadness.

He was never really good at playing basketball, either. This dawned on him in college before he quit, watching as the arms and legs of Teikou that had stayed behind in Tokyo breezed effortlessly around the court, making small talk while they ran each other to the ground. In retrospect, perhaps that was when the serious life-threatening disease had first wormed its way into his head. He had accrued enough good karma from being kind and unassertive in his childhood years to make it through high school relatively unscathed. Seirin had sustained his idealism, and his teammates were happy to stand by and watch it happen. Then high school ended, and he found himself standing in a familiar-new metaphorical darkness, watching through metaphorical eyes as the metaphorical light drew further and further away.

He suspects he simply ran out of luck. Some people are destined for great things, like Midorima, who will surely become a reputable doctor one day for expensive-looking families like Akashi’s, or Akashi himself, who has a master plan to escape the solar system written on Rhodia paper in his expensive-looking bedroom drawer. Others are simply not brilliant enough to draw the attention of the gods. Tetsuya, who still struggles, sometimes, to get his roommate to notice him when he walks into the bathroom, is just one of many.

Winter comes and goes. Today, too, he rises at eight in the morning, brushes his teeth, and puts hot water on the stove.

iv.

There is a particular type of candy that Tetsuya likes when he is writing. It is fruit and vinegar flavored, and good for distractions and also for distracting from the horror of attempting to put his thoughts into proper sentences. It is so effective that it can only be purchased at certain supermarkets instead of convenience stores. During particularly rough weeks, he goes through half a pack a day. When he runs out of candy to suck on while contemplating the meaning of human existence, he lies down on the floor and attempts to merge into it.

“Get up, Kurokocchi. I’ve brought the goods.”

Tetsuya does not get up. He does, however, roll over onto his side so he can stare at his own lifeless reflection in his laptop screen. “Should I call the cops?”

“Your stupid candy.” Kise throws the plastic bag at him. “I bought it.”

“Thank you.” Tetsuya gets up.

Kise is the actual reason he has been able to stay in this relatively nice, slightly mildewy apartment in Tokyo for so long. They split the rent each month, and even though Tetsuya does not live gregariously and therefore does not require much additional expenditure, the split remains uneven.

Their living arrangement is a matter of convenience. Kise and Aomine broke up after Tetsuya quit college for indeterminate reasons; Aomine went back to using basketball as a proxy for his feelings and Kise threw his full weight into fashion and modeling and whatever else he had been doing at the time. After a while, Aomine vanished off Tetsuya’s radar. Kise called him late one night, drunk out of his mind, and said he needed a place to stay so was Tetsuya’s free. He would pay rent. Also he missed Aomine and his dick. Tetsuya said yes. It seemed like a good idea then.

Living with Kise after years spent drifting down separate metaphorical tracks in life isn’t half as bad as idealistic, teenaged Tetsuya would have imagined. Kise doesn’t bring anyone back to their apartment and only goes out to drink on weekends and Tuesday nights. For all his theatrics and romcom endeavors in high school, he has emerged at twenty-five with a listening ear that rivals that of Akashi’s family therapist.

Kise doesn’t bring anyone back to their apartment, but neither does Tetsuya. He buys refills of Tetsuya’s favorite candy whenever he runs out, seemingly equipped with a bizarre psychic radar that tells him when Tetsuya’s sanity is closer to crumbling than usual, and he does this generously. He sometimes stands on the balcony with Tetsuya when he is feeling philosophical and tired, talking about his latest contract and the new Starbucks drink and some murder that took place in Nagano while the latter quietly lights a cigarette. It’s sort of strange, seeing someone you’ve only ever really fought against or with in the context of following cooking instructions from a Youtube channel in the kitchen, but Tetsuya isn’t fazed by much these days. 

v.

He’s reading a new book, about a group of children who are lovingly raised in a boarding school in the British countryside. The protagonist is quiet and introspective and observant, brave. At one point she finds an old song record and dances to it. Then, it disappears.

His parents were not pleased when he told them he was dropping out of college. They had invested good, hard-earned money into their son, whose presence was thin enough to cut with a butter knife and still could not, apparently, try hard enough to make himself seen by society in other ways. Why must I make society look at me, Tetsuya thought. He had invested good, hard-earned money into more abstract things in his own life as well. That had gotten him nowhere.

vi.

“Why’d you start smoking?”

“There was no particular reason.”

“Really.”

Kise pillows his head on his folded arms and watches him out of the corner of his eye, his pretty blond hair mussed by the fall breeze. Tetsuya wonders how he looks to him. These days he sleeps earlier, having run out of that manic midnight energy that fueled all of them through their teenage years; he hasn’t grown much since high school. Kagami would probably laugh at him for that. Kagami is probably as tall as a mountain now.

vii.

Aomine reappears on Tetsuya’s radar a few weeks after he turns twenty-seven. He has an ordinary job at an ordinary company now, and works ordinary hours that Tetsuya forgets immediately. Because of Kise, he has not been able to detach himself completely from the city, and lives on its outskirts in a quiet residential district populated with more cats than people. He only drinks on Thursdays and weekends.

They meet at a basketball court located beside an empty car park, where Tetsuya makes a space for himself at center court while Aomine walks around its perimeter, kicking at PET bottles and crumpled aluminium cans. Aomine laughs in a language that Tetsuya doesn’t recall him being able to speak, and asks if Kise is fond of cats. Tetsuya tells him that he is not sure, but if he buys him his favorite brand of conditioner Aomine may have better luck in getting him to say more than three words to him at once. They don’t play basketball.

“What about you,” Aomine asks as they’re walking out of the supermarket later that evening, carrying ten-yen plastic bags in his large basketball hands. “Are you getting by?”

“I am fine, thank you.”

They round the corner of the street. Tetsuya retrieves his lighter from his coat pocket. For someone who vanished off the radar, Aomine knows a surprisingly large amount about the rest of their ex-teammates— Murasakibara moved to Aomori and opened a bakery specializing in fruit-themed goods. Midorima has become a reputable doctor that fulfills the requests of expensive-looking families. Akashi has risen to the top of his father’s company, and begun to make inroads into interstellar travel, but Tetsuya knows this.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he says, taking a long drag. He can feel Aomine’s eyes on him, moving between the glowing tip of his cigarette and his face.

“Ducks have corkscrew dicks.”

“I know this.”

“Insects have metaphorical dicks.”

“I know you miss Kise dearly, Aomine, but is dick literally all you think about.” Aomine looks away, smiling. They continue in comfortable silence.

“You’re still lonely.” It’s a question and an answer. Both a judgment, and not.

“Alone,” Tetsuya corrects him politely, and then wonders how he will pay the rent by himself.

viii.

Once, in the middle of their first year, they took the train home together. They had stayed back practicing for so long that rush hour had come and gone, leaving the train carriages empty. Kagami sat next to him and stared into dead space and, when he eventually fell asleep, used Tetsuya’s shoulder as a badly-angled headrest. Tetsuya could not find the willpower in himself to wake him up. He sat there and wondered if Kagami knew how to make karaage, not quite supporting enough of Kagami’s weight to be actually helpful, but never letting him fall over. He wondered if he liked him, and decided that he did not.

In their third year of high school, he changed his mind. There was a multitude of reasons for this conclusion, and he could have written a thesis paper detailing the methods by which Kuroko Tetsuya had fallen for the big dumb prince of basketball, but he chose not to. He did not tell anyone about this strange, near-life-threatening disease. Instead, he cupped it in his palms like a terminal illness and prayed graduation would come soon. After that he went down the well-worn path of college and essays and picked up smoking along the way. Kagami was never spoken of ever again, at least not amongst those who had seen Tetsuya turn away from the light and walk back into himself.

Kagami was never spoken of again because Kagami went to America. Some people are destined for great things. Tetsuya was never one of them.

ix.

Tetsuya sees him again in the summer. Kagami Taiga has a dark blue coat slung over his shoulder and leather shoes and this small, half-apologetic smile that flickers across his face all lightbulb-ish, awkward and metaphorical and metaphorically awkward. He falters at the doorway, taking in the peeling furniture, the mismatched tables, the radio in the flowerpot hanging from the ceiling. Tetsuya touches him lightly on the shoulder and leads him to an empty seat.

Aomine had told him about this place. Having both fallen off Tetsuya’s very astute radar, one of them marginally earlier than the other, it had apparently been easy for them to come into contact. Determined not to let anyone else use physical objects as a proxy for their feelings, Aomine had helpfully provided a Sparknotes summary of Tetsuya’s twenties, only to be told Kagami has been dating the same person for the last four years. They had met in America.

Time has changed them all. Kagami no longer slouches in his seat or rearranges the items on the table with fidgety hands, and it’s only when his knees hit the underside of the table as he’s standing up that Tetsuya realizes how much taller he has gotten. There’s something expectant about his expression, like he thinks Tetsuya will come bursting out of the room at the back, quiet and sharp and hopeful like he was all those years ago. Some things remain the same, then. He is still terrible at hiding his feelings.

Tetsuya lingers at his table after serving his coffee. Do you think you’ll ever get married, Kagami asks. Tetsuya doubts so. No one ever caught your interest? No, not since high school. So you had feelings too once, huh, Kuroko. I am not an alien from outer space, or Akashi would have long since captured me and put me in solitary confinement. Geez, Kuroko, I was just kidding. Tetsuya tells him about Kise and Aomine while he lifts the cup gingerly to his lips, the two years they spent apart and the stray cats that hang out near Aomine’s place and how he’s worried about paying the rent now by himself. He talks about the novel he’s trying to write in his free time. How he’s getting older and his back is starting to give him problems and his favorite cigarette brand is growing incrementally more expensive. He doesn’t realize he’s spoken so much until Kagami’s cup clatters loudly against the saucer and his breath hitches. I’m glad you’re still here, Kagami says after a moment. I am too, Tetsuya tells him, and is surprised to realize he is referring to himself more than Kagami. He finished reading a novel recently, about a girl who is raised lovingly in a boarding school in the British countryside. She lives her life freely, loving who she wants and pushing away whoever she decides she can’t love until her friends start disappearing because they are clones and their organs are harvested for use by their originals. There’s one boy in particular, Tommy, who she realizes she still loves even after she becomes an adult. They have sex and talk about the past. He dies of organ failure.

I know that book, Kagami tells him. There’s a sliver of sunlight bleeding across his face, painting his skin like a story, one about a boy and a boy and a basketball who all went their separate ways. There are laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.

Tetsuya inclines his head a little. “I think you would have looked better in a burgundy coat,” he says quietly, and then goes back into the kitchen before Kagami can say anything.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i just really wanted to write older, mellower kuroko that smokes. in my mind's eye he kinda chills out after high school, gets more jaded, stops being all sparkly and starts pining more. since i've been hanging around knb properly for like 2 weeks only i'm still tryinna figure out what i want him to do with anyone but i got pissed as all hell about kagami yeeting off at the end of last game so that's kind of been haunting me through all my writing since then. so that's why kuroko just ends up being sad. i want to try writing akakuro, next time, maybe. could be a party. midotaka? who knows  
> thank you very much for reading! all comments, kudos, etc are deeply appreciated, but do what sparks you joy
> 
> have a good one


End file.
